“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” (No Country For Old Men)
“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” (Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness In The West)
“There is no God and we are his prophets.” (The Road)
"They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god." (Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness In The West)
"They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses' legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below." (Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness In The West)
“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.” (No Country For Old Men)
Motifs
Violence
Religion/faith
Death
Morality/Immorality
Existentialism
Info
In one of his few interviews (with The New York Times), McCarthy revealed that he respects only authors who "deal with issues of life and death," citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples of writers who do not rate with him. "I don't understand them ... To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange", he said.
Cormac used the same typewriter for almost 5o years. He used his Olivetti Lettera 32 to write nearly all of his fiction, screenplays, and correspondence from 1960 to 2009. In 2009 the typewriter was auctioned by Christies to benefit the Santa Fe Institute and sold to an unidentified American collector for $254,500, more than 10 times its estimate.
Maintenance of the typewriter consisted of "blowing out the dust with a service station hose".
His first ever televised interview after a career spanning nearly four decades, occurred in 2007 with a chinwag with Oprah. His first words were about his general shunning of the media spotlight: “I don’t think it’s good for your head – if you spend a lot of time writing about a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it, you should be doing it.”
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'The Road' was born from a specific moment. In roughly 2002, Cormac and his young son, John, went to El Paso and checked into an old hotel. One night at about 2am, as John slept, Cormac went over to the window and looked out over the town. Nothing moved, but he could hear trains and described it as "a very lonesome sound". He had an image of what the town might look like in 100 years. "I thought a lot about my little boy and I wrote [some] pages... About four years later I woke up in Ireland and realised it wasn't two pages of a notebook, it was a book. And it was about that man and that little boy." The book is dedicated to his son John.
McCarthy told Oprah that he prefers "simple declarative sentences" and that he uses capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but "never a semicolon." He does not use quotation marks for dialogue and believes there is no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks."
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